Eisenhower Warned Us About the 'Scientific Elite'

In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite."

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower.

The federal government had become a major financier of scientific research after World War II, and Eisenhower was worried that the spirit of open inquiry and progress would be corrupted by the priorities of the federal bureaucracy.

And he was right.

Today, many of the people protesting the Trump administration's cuts to federal funding for scientific research are part of that scientific, technological elite.

But there's a good chance that slashing federal spending will liberate science from the corrupting forces that Eisenhower warned us about.

"If you look at, particularly, 19th century Britain when science was absolutely in the private sector, we have some of the best science," says Terence Kealey, a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham and a critic of government science funding. "It comes from the wealth of the rich. Charles Darwin was a rich person. Even [scientists] who had no money had access to rich men's money one way or another. The rich paid for science."

Kealey points out that Britain's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita outpaced that of 19th-century France and Germany—both of which generously subsidized scientific research—indicating that the return on state subsidies in the form of economic growth was low. As America emerged as a superpower, its GDP per capita surpassed Britain's.

"So the Industrial Revolution was British, and the second Industrial Revolution, was American, and both were in the absence of the government funding of science," says Kealey.

Thomas Edison's industrial lab produced huge breakthroughs in telecommunications and electrification. Alexander Graham Bell's lab produced modern telephony and sound recording, all without government money. The Wright Brothers—who ran a bicycle shop before revolutionizing aviation—launched the first successfully manned airplane flight in December 1903, beating out more experienced competitors like Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who had received a grant from the War Department for his research.

The notion that the government needs to accelerate scientific progress was based on America's experience during World War II, when federally funded research led to breakthroughs in rocketry, medicine, and radar. The Manhattan Project, which cost $27 billion in today's dollars, employed more than half a million people and culminated in the creation of the atomic bomb and the discovery of nuclear fission.

"Lobbyists took the Manhattan Project and said, 'Look what government funding of science can do,' and they then twisted it," says Kealey. He acknowledges that the government can accomplish discrete, "mission-based" scientific projects—like racing toward a bomb—but he argues that this is very different from the generalized state funding of "basic research" that followed. 

In November 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a letter to Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Science and Development during the war. Roosevelt instructed Bush to come up with a plan to make federal funding of scientific research permanent. 

"It has been basic United States policy that government should foster the opening of new frontiers," wrote Bush in calling for the nationalization of basic science research. "It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers."

Bush's treatise eventually led to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950.

But it was a stunning accomplishment from America's greatest rival that would supercharge the nationalization of science. Sputnik, the world's first manmade satellite, seemed to confirm fears that the Soviets, with their centrally planned economy, might eclipse the U.S. in scientific innovation and weapons technology.

That turned out to be completely wrong. But in 1957, Americans were terrified.

After Sputnik, the Eisenhower administration tripled the budget of the National Science Foundation, which would provide federal grants to universities and labs.

If federal funding of science is counterproductive, as Kealey argues, what explains the success of Sputnik and the Manhattan Project?

Of course, government funding has led to major breakthroughs both during and after World War II, such as the synthesis and mass production of penicillin during World War II (though it was accidentally discovered in a contaminated hospital lab in 1928), cancer immunotherapy, artificial heart valves, and the gene-editing technology CRISPR.

But this has to be compared to what might have otherwise happened. Good economics takes into account not only the seen, but the unseen.

What are the unseen innovations the world misses out on when governments set the research agenda?

"If the government funds science, it actually takes the best scientists out of industry puts them in the universities, and then industry in fact suffers," says Kealey.

After Sputnik, government money pushed basic science out of the private sector. By 1964, two-thirds of all research and development was paid for by the federal government.

"If you were a tool maker in Ohio in 1964, and you wanted to invest in R&D to make better tools because you wanted the beat your competitors in Utah, you wrote a grant to the Department of Commerce," says Kealey. "That's how nationalized American science was … Eisenhower's warning is absolutely correct."

In academic science, process often takes precedence over outcomes. Researchers are incentivized to publish peer-reviewed papers that garner citations, which helps them secure prestigious academic posts and more federal grants.

"What happens under peer review under the government is that there's homogenization, and only one set of ideas is allowed to emerge," says Kealey.

The pressure to publish has created a positivity bias, where an increasing number of papers supporting a hypothesis are published, while negative findings are often buried.

One biotech company could confirm the scientific findings of only six out of 53 "landmark" cancer studies.

Swedish researchers found that up to 70 percent of positive findings in certain brain imaging studies could be false.

A team of researchers re-examined 100 psychology studies and successfully replicated only 39. "There is still more work to do to verify whether we know what we think we know," they concluded.

In an influential 2005 paper, Stanford University professor John Ioannidis flatly concluded that "most published research findings are false." He argued that the current peer review model encourages groupthink, writing that "prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma."

"You end up with a monolithic view, and so you crush what's so important in science, which is different ideas competing in a marketplace of ideas," says Kealey.

For decades, the federal government advised Americans to avoid saturated fat and prioritize carbohydrates based on the work of a researcher named Ancel Keys, who received substantial funding from the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Today, the debate that Keys suppressed rages on.

"Ancel Keys said, 'I have the solution, it's all to do with fats,'" says Kealey. "And very quickly, you couldn't get grants to the American Heart Association unless you subscribe to Ancel Key's theory of fat. Having captured this small little redoubt, he then moved to the [National Science Foundation], and then suddenly the whole world believed only one thing."

More recently, Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya was attacked by the public health establishment for questioning the COVID-19 lockdowns. He told Reason there's an inherent conflict between the NIH director setting public health policy and doling out grant money.

"If you have an NIH director that [sets policy and distributes money], they control the minds of so many scientists. It's an inherent conflict, and nobody's going to really speak. Nobody's going to disagree with them because that's the cash cow," says Bhattacharya, who President Donald Trump appointed head of the NIH. His agency now faces a proposed 40 percent spending cut.

But if Kealey is right, slashing science funding could, counterintuitively, accelerate medical innovation in the long run.

"If these changes can be managed in such a way that these scientists can move from the NIH into the private sector without massive disruptions to all the work and research they're doing, that will be to the benefit of America," says Kealey.

It would be similar to what happened in the early 1970s, when Congress slashed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's budget in half, laying the groundwork for the rise of the computer age.

"What happens to all those scientists? Well, they all go out to Silicon Valley, because they've all been made redundant … And they invent the modern world," says Kealey. 

"New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life," wrote Roosevelt in his letter to Bush.

But maybe Roosevelt drew the wrong conclusions from the war. "Vision, boldness, and drive" can be found amongst the dreamers and tinkerers working in private laboratories, who are often too iconoclastic to be good candidates for government research grants but whose ideas, simply, work.

"It's technology that keeps science honest," says Kealey. "If you're a scientist and you make an observation which can be tested, 'If you do this, the rocket will go that way, if you do that, the rocket will go this way,' then as a scientist you have to be honest because you'll soon be found out. But if your money comes from the government and it comes by peer review from committees, and the committees subscribe to a false paradigm, no one is going to test your paradigm."

Before government money flooded in, private research facilities like Bell Labs were centers of innovation. AT&T's research lab discovered radio astronomy in 1933 when its scientists tried to figure out why its telephone wires experienced interference the longer they stretched.

"You have a mission, you do research, and many times you make discoveries in pure science that actually are very valuable to everyone else," says Kealey.

Vannevar Bush and FDR were wrong: The private sector can push forward the scientific frontier. In fact, federal funding of R&D in America has flatlined for decades, while business investment keeps going up.

Abandoning NASA's Cold War space race monopoly, the government has outsourced rocket design to competing private companies. The world can barely keep pace with the breakthroughs announced by Silicon Valley's privately funded AI labs.

"Science in America today is actually more private than it was in 1940. People just haven't seen it. No one wants to talk about it because there are no votes in privatizing science," says Kealey. "I would like to see that process continued."

Let's heed Eisenhower's warning. The question is not whether or not America should continue conducting scientific research. It's about who is in control.

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• Editor: John Osterhoudt
• Graphics: Lex Villena